Our story

How we started?

Sometime in 2008, Daniela Reichman and Michal Segolov, two engineers from the Tel Aviv office, got the support of professor Yossi Matias, Google vice president and director of the development center in Israel, to start a program that would bring junior high school students to Google's offices.

Among the first to bring up the topic, the program won the Anita Borg Institute 2015 social impact award.

As women in high tech, Daniela and Michal always felt that they (and other minorities) are underrepresented in computer science. Since the two thought (and still think) that computer science is the most interesting career, they saw no reason why other women would not choose this field.

They believed that the gap in representation between men and women in computer science, something which has since been extensively researched, may be due to the absence of early exposure to the subject and role models in particular.

Daniela and Michal began holding conferences where they would meet young students with potential to succeed as computer scientists, expose them to the field and share their love of this career with them. They hoped that meetings of this kind would increase the chances of these girls later choosing this field.

Why is the advancement of women in technology professions still being discussed? Is it still a problem?

Yes.

This is a long story made short. This problem is not unique to Israel. It pervades the whole world. In fact, until the 1980s, computer science was considered a career for women, but once personal computers and computer games began making their way into every home, the numbers began to drop and more and more men found themselves in the profession while women found themselves in others. There are much less women today who have chosen to first study and then work in computer science.

Research has shown that women decide whether they prefer the humanities or the sciences sometime early in adolescence. It is therefore highly relevant to expose girls in middle school (or even younger) to computer science - even now more than ever.

Daniela and Michal reached 500 students in the first year. The program has since continued to grow. Each year about 2000 teenagers visit the Google offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa and many more students are exposed to the subject through other program events and collaborations. The program has even made its way to other Google offices around the world, including Turkey, Warsaw, London and Ireland.

Our work here is still not finished.